Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Although my interest in Atlantic-Canadian literature goes back to my
graduate work at McGill University in the mid-1980s, this present study
was truly galvanized by a conference I co-organized with Jeanette Lynes
at Acadia University in the fall of 2004 titled “Surf’s Up!...

1. Introduction: Now Our Masters Have No Borders

Thus writes Jeanette Lynes in her poem “Markings,” gesturing to the international
appeal of the plucky heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 classic
Anne of Green Gables. Such is the power of Montgomery’s ictional world,
Lynes sardonically conveys, that tourists come to Montgomery’s...

Section One: I’se the B’y That Leaves the Boats: The Changing World of Work

In contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature, work is a conspicuous
preoccupation: the availability of work, the conditions of work, the changing
nature of work, and the larger context in which that work does or not
does not take place. That larger context, of course, for the last three or four
decades has been shaped by economic...

2.Sucking the Mother Dry: The Fisheries

As a whole generation of Atlantic-Canadian historians have illustrated,
one of the main problems with mythologizing the life of the independent
petty producer is that it tends to obscure a much more complicated economic
and social reality. Writing of the reliance on wage labour of agricultural
workers in the nineteenth-century Maritimes...

3. Acceptable Levels of Risk”: Mining and Offshore Oil

The fishing industry, like the two other staple industries with which the
history of Atlantic Canada is associated (farming and lumbering) readily
lends itself to the kind of Folk iconography that Ian McKay and James
Overton, among others, have highlighted and critiqued, especially because
of the capitalist and class relations that such iconography...

4. Uncivil Servitude: The Service Sector

Along with the more fundamentally modern, industrial, and corporatized
visions of physical labour in the Maritimes and Newfoundland explored
in the previous two chapters, another signiicant element of work in the
region that runs counter to traditional stereotypes is the pronounced shift
of the economy toward the growing service sector. If, as Margaret Conrad
and James Hiller argue, the four decades after...

Conclusion to Section One

To stress the degree to which contemporary writers in the East are increasingly
conscious of the impact of these economic, political, and historical
forces on the lives of Atlantic Canadians is not to suggest that Atlantic-
Canadian literature as a whole has tended to perpetrate...

Section Two: “About as Far from Disneyland as You Can Possibly Get”: The Reshaping of Culture

One of the crucial achievements of representations of work in contemporary
Atlantic-Canadian literature is that they often situate people working
in the resource sectors or service sector within a larger, even global web of
political, economic, and social relations...

5. “The Simpler and More Colourful Way of Life”

One of the problems with the Folk paradigm, Ian McKay stresses, is
that it promotes ethnically exclusive deinitions of culture. McKay highlights
how identifying people as members of the “Folk” “only worked if
there were some who were not ‘Folk.’”...

6. Rebuffing the Gaze

The work of Native, Black, and women writers in the Atlantic provinces
increasingly serves to contest the prevailing power structures in the region,
challenging the demographic and cultural hierarchy and exclusiveness of
Folk stereotypes in the process. Another important strategy more and more
evident in the literature of the East Coast...

Conclusion to Section Two

In an economically struggling region like Atlantic Canada, satiric critiques
of tourism may seem like kicking the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Moreover, it must be stressed that some forms of tourism are more benign
and locally beneicial than others and that these writers are not necessarily
resisting tourism in and of itself...

Section Three: The Age of Sale: History, Globalization, and Commodification

Historical iction, as many commentators have observed, tends to be
characterized by a double vision: while it looks to the past, its representation
of that past is necessarily refracted through, and often consciously
energized by, concerns of the present. This insight is particularly salient
in appreciating the current surge...

7. “A ‘Sea-Change’ of Sorts”: Newfoundland and Labrador

The fact that the political, economic, and cultural developments described
in previous chapters—especially the crisis in the isheries and a growing
concern about Atlantic Canada’s place in Confederation—have resonated
more clearly in Newfoundland and Labrador...

8. “A Place That Didn’t Count Any More”: The Maritimes

Given the substantial tradition of historical fiction in the region, it
is curious that there has not been a profusion of historical fiction in the
Maritimes equivalent to that in Newfoundland and Labrador over the last
few decades. The writing of historical fiction...

Conclusion to Section Three

One of the possible reasons for the growing preoccupation with history,
in Canada as elsewhere, is the anxiety occasioned by the mobility, deracination,
and sense of placelessness that characterize our highly technological,
globalized consumer society...

Conclusion: Speculative Fiction for the Rest of the Country?

It may seem curious, at the end of a book on Atlantic-Canadian literature
that is trying to counter the image of Atlantic Canadians as a backward-looking
people, to have a section on representations of the past. What the examination
of the texts in the preceding section...

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